The unofficial, unauthorized view of Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. The Ancestry Insider reports on, defends, and constructively criticizes these two websites and associated topics. The author attempts to fairly and evenly support both.

Monday, October 26, 2009

FamilySearch Community Trees

Ever wish you could reconstruct the families that lived in your ancestral village in the 1750s? FamilySearch works with individuals and groups with the expertise to piece together the families that lived together historically in a community. We’re experimenting with ways to make these richly-sourced lineage-linked trees more available and expand the number of people helping with this effort. Check it out and tell us what you think.

Updated 21 Oct 2009.

The website currently hosts 19 collections (“Trees”) with 484,048 families containing 1,189,105 individuals. For individuals with surnames, there are 77,130 unique surnames across all the trees. The 3901 sources are linked to 106 repositories.

While titled historical on the labs website and bearing the URLhistfam.familysearch.org, the website itself is titled “Community Trees.” The website seems to be a combination of community trees documenting a specific community and historical trees, documenting nobility back to medieval times. Community trees were produced by the FamilySearch Family Reconstitution team headed by Raymond W. Madsen in combination with local partners. Workers canvassed particular record sets to reconstitute all the families of the locality. Historical trees were produced by the Medieval Families Unit, now identified as the Historical Families Unit.

Some trees can be downloaded in GEDCOM format. One has oral genealogies attached. Some partners may have additional information on their own websites. Partners can make corrections and additions to the information shown. Some of the trees are works in progress.

Canada: New Brunswick: Southampton: Millville Communities Family Tree: The Millville Community Family Tree is a joint project with the community of Millville, New Brunswick and FamilySearch International to preserve the heritage of the communities of Southampton parish and other communities including some in Bright and Queensbury parish, through genealogy.

Canada: Toronto: Youngs in Toronto: Extracted and linked records of Young families in Toronto, Ontario from provincial civil registration: births (1869-1909), marriages (1869-1924), and deaths (1869-1934). Also includes allied families.

England: London: Residence of London: The London Project consists of individuals living in London extracted from Boyd's Citizen's of London; controlled extraction records from the International Genealogical Index (IGI); and other records dealing with London.

Europe: Royal and Noble Houses (predominately German): This database was first compiled by the previous Medieval Families Unit and has been updated and corrected using on-line databases, Schwennicke, and other nobility sources.

Iceland: Iceland Historical Family Trees: Linked Genealogies of Iceland from 100 A.D to the 1800s extracted from sagas, parish registers, census records and compiled family histories.

Pacific Islands: Cole Jensen Collection: This important collection is one of the best sources for family records, pedigrees, and historical information that is available for the Pacific Island People.

Pacific Islands: French Polynesia: Atuona Island: Atuona, located on the southern side of Hiva Oa island, is the centrer of the of Hiva-Oa. Atuona was the capital of all the Marquesas Islands but it has been replaced by Taiohae (on Nuku Hiva). Atuona comprises the valleys of Atuona, Taaoa, Tahauku and Hanamate.

United States: Washington: Lewis County: Community Family Trees: This database contains the records of families listed in the 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900 US Census for Lewis County, Washington. We have merged families that appear in multiple census records together to provide a better view of the family over the years. The data that came from each census can be seen in the source citation for that record. This is a preliminary version of the merging and will be updated with an improved version containing additional records from the History of Lewis County, Washington (by Nix) in October 2009.

If you have a database you have created from original source material that you think would be a good addition to the FamilySearch Community Trees or would like to participate somehow, contact Raymond W. Madsen at madsenrw@familysearch.org.

The “labs” nature of the website was observed in several deficiencies. I found some operations extremely slow. I found no way to browse. Some links showed no useful purpose. The single photograph would not display. A PDF family group report displayed the wrong site URL.

The Historical Trees Unit and the Family Reconstitution Unit are producing conclusion trees that are GML (Genealogical Maturity Level) 3 and GML 4. By contrast, New FamilySearch (NFS), the tree, has been pre-populated by lots and lots of data at GML 1 and 2 and is subject to edit by genealogists of any level, making it an unsuitable environment for publication of more mature genealogical data. Community Trees is a wonderful forward move allowing FamilySearch to publish their high maturity lineage linked trees.

I have long supported TNG as a tool of future genealogy. It's great to see that even the FamilySearch team decided Darrin Lythgoes' program was better than rolling their own. It may not be new.familysearch, but it's doing a great job. Go Darrin!

I have done a lot with Beta, Pilot, nFS, Forums and Wiki. This Community Trees thing has generally puzzled me. I wish there were more blog posts and analysis of it online. I teach about family history, but I have avoided teaching about this because it seems too complex. For example, will it become part of the new version of FamilySearch.org? How? Will it be searchable under the Trees option on the homepage? That would make sense. I can understand the usefulness of keeping source based trees seperate from each other and from nFS because where the connections end and begin can signify that group as families coming from a specific record set. If I understand it correctly, the purpose is to provide an easier method of research, skipping the historical record stage for us because you are doing that part and documenting it. It is a lot like Extraction which was put into the IGI, but the sources are cited better and the people are more connected within sourses right?Please share everything you can about the project. I'd love to see a new blog post letting us know it is not dead. I have not seen one since November 2009.

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The Ancestry Insider was a readers’ choice for the top four genealogy news and resources blogs, part of Family Tree Magazine’s “40 Best Genealogy Blogs” for 2010. He reports on the two big genealogy organizations, Ancestry.com and FamilySearch. He was named a “Most Popular Genealogy Blogs” by ProGenealogists, and has received Family Tree Magazine’s “101 Best Web Sites” award every year since 2008. A genealogical technologist, the Insider has a post-graduate technology degree and holds a dozen technology patents in the United States and abroad. He has done genealogy since 1972 and has worked in the computer industry since 1978. He was Time Magazine Man of the Year in both 1966 and 2006. And he really is descended from an Indian princess.

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